In 1990 I went to French Guiana for the first time with Ian Wallace, Dan & Lou Pegg, Geoff Brown & Alan Mawson. One of the highlights was a 5-day trip up the Maroni River on an outboard canoe with a group of French tourists – although I have to admit to having reservations at the start because it was far more basic than I had (naively) assumed. We spent the nights staying in native villages and were catered for very well by our guides. The days were mainly spent on the river but we stopped a few times to eat and relax – the water was really warm, like a bath 🙂

I will post more photos when I have scanned them, and I apologise for the poor quality but they are scans of rather poor quality 6×4-inch prints:

our first night in hammocks (me in the fg)

my favourite village – truly native indian and very peaceful

mist rising in early morning

me failing to draw a native bow

getting ready to pull boats through the rapids

the most beautiful place we stopped to swim and lunch

preparing to run the rapids – note everyone else got off leaving us in for balast!

Recently I have been working on adding a new species to the British list to our key. Thelyconychia solivaga is a small tachinid that seems to live on fairly stony/rocky coastal sites and is very rare in the UK – in fact only 3 specimens have been found so far (by Laurence Clemons in Kent […]

The genus Phryxe contains a few common species (nemea, vulgaris & heraclei) and a few very rare ones (magnicornis & erythrostoma). The key pulls out nemea first by the wide gap between the facial-ridge bristles and the descending parafrontals – wider than the width of antenna-3 plus the mustardy/yellow frontal area. Splitting off heraclei has […]

In the keys to Gonia one of the couplets asks you to consider the shininess of the face but this can be a confusing thing to judge when you only have one specimen. In this mini article I have taken photos of the 2 choices to make it clear. The first thing to do is […]

For many years Linnaemya picta had been confused with rossica because early workers (e.g. Fonseca) hadn’t tried using the European keys. Since the ‘discovery’ of picta in Kent it has spread across southern England as far as Bedfordshire, Oxfordshire & Berkshire and so now we have another fairly common black-legged species to confuse with tessellans. […]

In Andersen’s 1996 book “The Siphonini (Diptera: Tachinidae) or Europe” he made several changes to the names of Siphona spp., which have proved a bit confusing. The changes (and subsequent reversions) illustrate a few nice aspects of modern taxonomy and so I thought I would write a little piece on what happened. Every species is […]